The Most Popular AMD Linux/Open-Source News For Q1'2021

Written by Michael Larabel in AMD on 31 March 2021 at 12:00 AM EDT. Add A Comment
AMD
With AMD's busy Q1 of introducing the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card, introducing the Ryzen 5000 mobile series, the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" series launch, and continuing to advance their open-source/Linux software efforts, it was another busy quarter. Here is a look back from the Linux/open-source perspective of what interested readers the most.

Not counting our Linux hardware reviews or featured benchmark articles, below is a look at the most viewed AMD/Radeon stories of the quarter out of more than one hundred original articles. AMD is excitingly ramping up their Linux staff, much kernel progress is being made, Linux-friendly vendors like System76 have been expanding their AMD powered offerings, ROCm progress, more Coreboot talk, and other work achieved.

It will be interesting to see what Q2 has in store... I am still checking all the major online retailers daily in still trying to get my hands on Ryzen 5000 series laptops for Linux testing, so stay tuned there as hopefully will find some in stock during Q2. There will also be more EPYC 7003 series Linux benchmarks and other Radeon Linux driver testing planned.

AMD Is Currently Hiring More Linux Engineers
It looks like thanks to AMD's increasing sales and continuing successes in the enterprise space with more HPC wins and the like, AMD is hiring more Linux engineers. AMD currently has several interesting job openings on the Linux front.

Chrome 89 vs. Firefox 86 Performance Benchmarks On AMD Ryzen + Ubuntu Linux
Given this week's launch of Chrome 89 and the recent Firefox 86 debut, here are some quick benchmarks for those curious about the current performance when using Ubuntu Linux with a AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and Radeon graphics.

dav1d 0.8 Released With More Optimizations - More AMD Performance
Dav1d 0.8 was released this weekend (and subsequently 0.8.1 too) as the latest major release for this CPU-based AV1 decoder hosted by the VideoLAN project. Dav1d continues to be about offering the best AV1 decode speed and with the v0.8 series are even faster results -- so here are some of our initial data points as well from some weekend benchmarking.

The 11 Most Interesting Features For Linux 5.11 - Lots For AMD + Intel This Cycle
Linux 5.11 stable is expected to be released on Sunday barring any second thoughts by Linus Torvalds that could lead to an eighth weekly release candidate that would in turn push the official release back by one week. In any case, Linux 5.11 will be formally out soon and it's an exciting one on the feature front.

System76 Introduces Thelio Mira Computers - Powered By AMD Ryzen 5000 Series
System76 today introduced the Thelio Mira as their nwest desktop computer offering that is sized between the Thelio and Thelio Major while still packing quite a bit of compute potential.

AMD FreeSync HDMI Patch Appearing For Their Open-Source Linux Driver
While the AMD Linux graphics driver for some time has been supporting FreeSync over DisplayPort connections, FreeSync displays connected via HDMI have not been supported. But now we are finally seeing the start of patches at least as far as HDMI pre-v2.1 support is concerned.

Linux 5.11 Released With Intel Integer Scaling, AMD Performance Boost, RTX 30 KMS
What better way for open-source enthusiasts to celebrate Valentine's Day than with the stable release of the Linux 5.11 kernel... Linus Torvalds even changed the kernel codename for the occasion to being the "Valentine's Day Edition" kernel.

Linux 5.10.20 Released - Fixes The Erroneous Record-Breaking AMD Clock Frequencies
Recent kernel point releases have reported erroneous maximum frequencies on AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 CPUs in the area of 6GHz+ while now with the latest stable releases that is being fixed.

The AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 Performance Fix For Linux 5.11 Has Landed
Just in time for the expected Linux 5.11 stable release on Sunday, the AMD frequency invariance performance regression I've been noting and writing about since Christmas day has been resolved with the previously covered fix having been merged today.

PyTorch 1.8 Released With AMD ROCm Binaries
PyTorch 1.8 was released on Thursday as the newest version of this widely-used machine learning library. Exciting many will be easier AMD Radeon ROCm support with Python wheels now provided for that Radeon Open eCosystem support.

AMD Has A Very Exciting Announcement Next Week
AMD has announced that next week on 15 March they will be hosting a digital launch event for the EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors.

QEMU 6.0 On The Way With LTO Support, AMD SEV-ES Guests, Multi-Process Experiment
This week marked the hard feature freeze for QEMU 6.0 along with the tagging of QEMU 6.0-rc0. The QEMU 6.0 release should happen around the end of April for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

The Latest Open-Source AMD Firmware / Coreboot Happenings In Early 2021
While AMD has been crushing it when it comes to Linux performance and generally delivering good launch-day support, the one area many Linux/open-source advocates have been eager and hopeful to see change is around Coreboot support and ideally open-source firmware support such as by re-opening AGESA. Both inside and outside of AMD there continues being work in this direction.

AMD Ryzen 5000 Temperature Monitoring Support Sent In For Linux 5.12
Due to an unfortunate misalignment of the Ryzen 5000 series launch and the Linux kernel cycles, CPU temperature monitoring for Ryzen 5000 (Zen 3) desktop CPUs isn't landing until now with the Linux 5.12 kernel cycle.

A Fix Has Been Proposed For The Slower AMD Performance On Linux 5.11
With the in-development Linux 5.11 kernel there are many great features and improvements especially for AMD users with some new drivers and other pleasant enhancements. But as I outlined back on Christmas day: Linux 5.11 Is Regressing Hard For AMD Performance With Schedutil. Fortunately, a fix is now en route to the Linux 5.11 kernel for fixing that performance regression affecting AMD Zen 2/3 desktops and servers.

AMD Sends In More "New Stuff" For Radeon Graphics With Linux 5.12
Sent in last week were many AMD graphics driver updates slated for Linux 5.12 including the likes of Radeon RX 6000 series OverDrive support. This week marks another batch of AMDGPU kernel driver changes being submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.12 cycle.

AMD + Older Intel CPUs To See Much Faster AES-NI XTS Crypto Performance On Linux 5.12
AMD processors along with older Intel processors will enjoy much faster AES-NI XTS crypto performance with the Linux 5.12 kernel this spring.

AMD Announces The Radeon RX 6700 XT For $479
AMD today announced the Radeon RX 6700 XT as the newest RDNA 2 graphics card to begin shipping later this month.

System76 Pangolin Laptop Launches - Powered By AMD Ryzen 4000 Series
Going back to last December System76 had been teasing a new Pangolin laptop that would be AMD powered. Finally their new laptop has launched with Ryzen 4000 series mobile processors and making use of the integrated Radeon graphics.

AMD Clarifies ROCm Compute Support For GUI Applications
AMD recently added a notice to the ROCm repository reinforcing their focus on headless, non-GUI workloads while now that statement is being sort of retracted and they have clarified their support intentions around this open-source Radeon Open eCosystem driver stack.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week